


Oh So Far From Home

by vondrostes



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst and Porn, Bottom Harry, Canon Compliant, Drinking, Feminine Harry, Jamaica 2016, M/M, Masturbation, Other, Power Bottom Harry, Riding, Rimming, Song: Carolina (Harry Styles), Sweat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 14:02:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20390875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vondrostes/pseuds/vondrostes
Summary: Harry has a little trouble coming up with another song to put on the album. Mitch is happy to help.





	Oh So Far From Home

**Author's Note:**

> This was another Request! Set in Jamaica during the recording of HS1; I wanted to explore the origin story of Carolina becoming the Hitch Anthem during tour.
> 
> Twitter: @vondrostes & @vondrostesupd8s  
Tumblr: @vondrostes

Mitch had zoned out halfway through the conversation currently taking place in the kitchen over where to eat that night, but he didn’t really want to leave the room. Not only would it be rude, but also Mitch was starving after a very unsatisfactory breakfast and lunch, and if there was any point he felt he could insert his opinion into the argument, he was planning to take that opportunity.

But then suddenly, the world swam back into focus, and for the first time in a long while, Mitch realized that Harry was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that’s why the discussion had been drawn out so long. Harry was usually the deciding factor at mealtimes.

And now that he was thinking about Harry, he realized that he couldn’t even remember when he’d last spoken to him after they finished working a couple hours ago.

“I’ll be back,” Mitch said abruptly as he pushed off the counter and headed toward the entryway that led to the other side of the house. He didn’t even apologize for cutting off Alex midsentence, too hyper-focused now on tracking Harry down.

Mitch ended up finding Harry where he usually did when Harry went missing for any extended period of time—holed up in his bedroom under the covers. This time, Harry wasn’t napping, though. He was sitting up with the duvet tented over his knees, hunched over with his journal in his lap and a pen between his teeth, looking very obviously frustrated by whatever he was attempting to do.

Mitch parked himself at the very end of the bed, his body twisted toward Harry as he waited for Harry to look up at him. A few more seconds passed before that happened, but finally, Harry lifted his gaze to meet Mitch’s with a resigned expression as he set his journal down off to the side.

“You feeling okay?” Mitch asked. It was relatively unusual for Harry to be in such a visibly bad mood.

Harry nodded dully before opening his mouth to reply. “Jeff—well, the label—wants another upbeat song to put on the album before we resubmit it,” he elaborated. “I’ve been going through everything in my old journals looking for ideas, but we scrapped most of the stuff I would have showed you guys already. I have nothing to go off of, basically.”

Mitch pulled his socked feet up onto the bedspread and situated himself cross-legged across from Harry. “I can help you write something if you want,” he offered. For the most part, he’d been brought in during the late stages of the process, after Harry had already decided on lyrics and the sound he wanted to use for the song. But recently, Mitch had found himself showing Harry the old tracks from Total Navajo, and Harry had seemed to like them, so he supposed that offering his talents in the writing department for real couldn’t hurt.

Harry smiled at Mitch, but there was still a touch of hopelessness to it, like he didn’t really think they’d accomplish whatever it was Jeff had asked of him. “I appreciate that,” he said.

Mitch figured that was good enough, so he leaned over to pick up Harry’s discarded pen and journal, and they got to work.

By the time dinner actually rolled around, Harry had managed to pinpoint a girl he’d gone out with several months back as a source of inspiration for the song rather than relying on any of his actual past relationships, which had thus far been the origin of a healthy amount of angst on the album.

“So you said you hit it off right away,” Mitch said as he went over the snippets of lyrics that they’d tried out before ultimately scrapping. “But you haven’t spoken since?”

Harry shook his head. “Didn’t really have the time,” he replied vaguely, but something about his tone sounded a bit off to Mitch, especially since Harry was practically on his phone all the time when he wasn’t working or fucking around with the guys.

“Okay, well,” Mitch continued, at a loss for how they were supposed to write a song about a complete stranger that Harry hadn’t seen in ages who he apparently was set up on a blind date with after a messy breakup. “Like, what do you remember about her? What did she look like? Where was she from?”

Mitch listened to Harry wax eloquently about this girl, feeling his stomach forming into knots—from hunger, he reminded himself—all the while as he jotted down whatever details he thought would potentially fit into a song.

“The whole Southern Belle angle could be something,” Mitch mused as he tapped Harry’s pen against the tip of his nose. “You like country, right? We could work in some of those influences into the music, really diversify the sound on the album.”

Harry hummed affirmatively but unenthusiastically, and Mitch glanced up to find him staring at the page Mitch had been working on inside his journal with an inscrutable expression.

“Can I ask you something?” Mitch found himself saying without meaning to. He lowered the pen as Harry slowly nodded with a slight frown. Mitch paused, swallowing roughly to clear his throat before he continued. “Did you sleep with her?” he finally asked in a low tone, watching carefully as Harry’s expression slowly shuttered right before his eyes.

“Is that vital information you need for the songwriting process?” Harry asked almost suspiciously, like he was worried Mitch had ulterior motives behind asking.

Mitch just shrugged. “It might help,” he replied. “I mean, what was it you liked so much about her?”

Harry was silent for a few seconds before finally replying. “I suppose I just sort of admired her,” he told Mitch. “She was almost like…too perfect, you know?”

Mitch was pretty sure he’d never met a single human being barring Harry himself who even came close to fitting that description, but he nodded along anyway and started to write in earnest, feeling the pressure of the ticking clock on Harry’s wall as the dinnertime they’d set for their group outings drew ever closer.

Fifteen minutes later, he had most of a first verse with a bit more input of Harry, and while it was still pretty shabby, it was a start at least. Mitch turned over the journal for Harry to look over, and he scanned the scribbled down lyrics with an approving expression.

“Can’t believe I’ve somehow roped you into writing this shit for me,” Harry joked.

Mitch shrugged again. “I wouldn’t have come all the way to Jamaica if I wasn’t willing to put in the work,” he pointed out.

Harry looked up with a dimpled smile pulling at the left side of his mouth. “And I love you for that,” he replied as he set the journal down and climbed out of bed, stretching his arms over his head and pushing up onto his tiptoes with an exaggerated groan. “But we should probably go out and see what the others want to do about food.”

The other guys had managed to find a bar and restaurant within walking distance that they hadn’t already eaten at in the time they’d been in Jamaica, and neither Harry nor Mitch had any objections to their choice, so the whole group set off en masse down the road to the beach, where they walked along the shore for another ten minutes or so before finally arriving at their destination.

After eating, they all made straight for the bar, and Harry (being Harry) bought everyone exactly two rounds of shots before leaving them to their own devices. Mitch ended up sitting next to Harry in a cozy little booth on the other side of the room, a pitcher of some kind of fruit punch or lemonade with flower petals floating around in it positioned between them.

“This is non-alcoholic, right?” Mitch checked as he poured himself a glass of the mystery liquid, staring in suspicion at the glass Harry had already downed a good three-quarters of before Mitch had even sat down.

Harry nodded. “Don’t want to deal with the hangover tomorrow,” he said in the syrupy-slow voice that let Mitch know immediately he was buzzed off the tequila.

Mitch was feeling it too pretty soon, though, and together the two of them ended up using the utensils laying out on the table to bang out a few test rhythms to the verse they’d been working on back at the house. But for whatever reason—maybe the alcohol, maybe the heat, maybe just a pure and simple lack of inspiration—nothing was quite clicking.

At some point in the evening, Mitch glanced up at Harry, who was still in the middle of trying out another series of beats against the tabletop, only for his vision to zoom in automatically on a single bead of sweat trickling down the side of Harry’s neck.

There wasn’t anything mysterious about it; Mitch was just as sweaty if not more so. It was the cost of doing business somewhere as warm as Jamaica. The beaches were great—the temperatures less so, in Mitch’s opinion.

Now that Mitch had noticed the tiny droplet of sweat clinging to Harry’s skin, though, he couldn’t take his eyes off of it.

“What—” Harry started to ask, noticing Mitch’s abrupt shift in focus. He didn’t have the chance to finish the question before Mitch suddenly leaned over to wipe away the bead of sweat from Harry’s throat with his thumb, his eyes widening when Mitch popped the tip of his thumb into his mouth to taste the salty tang of Harry’s sweat without considering why he was even doing it.

Mitch hastily lifted his glass before he could draw even more attention to the action by making a clumsy apology and downed the rest of the sweet liquid in one go. “I think I’m gonna head back to the villa,” he said afterward, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth as he lowered the glass back down on the table.

Mitch wasn’t counting on Harry jumping up to join him as soon as he stood up from the table to make a quick exit—alone. Apparently, Harry wasn’t about to let that happen.

“I’ll come with you,” Harry said, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste as he followed Mitch out. It wasn’t like Mitch could say no.

Harry didn’t stop by the bar to close his tab on his way to the back door. He didn’t like dealing with cash when they went out, so it was usually Tyler or Alex who appointed themselves as the money-handler for the evening, freeing Harry up to sprint across the sand ahead of Mitch, pirouetting and leaping down the beach while Mitch just trudged along behind.

Mitch watched Harry with his shoulders around his ears and his hands shoved inside his pockets, feeling distinctly uncomfortable for a reason he couldn’t put a name to. His skin felt prickly from the heat, like there were hundreds of needles stabbing him along his neck and spine as he walked, and his shirt clung unpleasantly to his skin under his arms and around his waist from the sweat he’d accumulated while sitting inside the bar.

If Harry were experiencing even a fraction of that, he wasn’t showing any signs of it as he gallivanted around on the shore, kicking up sand into the air and spinning closer and closer to the waves. Finally, he stopped and stood stock still a few feet from the tide line, staring straight at Mitch as he drew closer.

“We should go skinny-dipping,” Harry announced loudly once Mitch was within earshot again.

Mitch just stopped and stared back at him. “What?”

Harry didn’t answer, instead turning around and starting to tear off his clothes right then and there. Mitch blinked at him a few times before slowly reaching down to do the same. If he couldn’t escape Harry, it was clear he had no choice but to join him for whatever harebrained ideas his tequila-addled mind could come up with.

Harry was already waist deep in the waves when Mitch finished undressing on the beach, so he quickly dashed after Harry, not wanting to be caught standing there in the sand, completely naked, by some poor, unsuspecting passer-by.

Harry seemed oblivious to any potential concerns as he twisted around in the water like a dolphin—or like a dog trying to rid itself of its nervous energy by running around in circles and chasing its own tail.

For Mitch’s part, he mostly just watched Harry while bracing himself in the sand against the force of the waves trying to push them back to shore.

Inevitably, they ended up moving out deeper into the water, until they both had to jump up on their tiptoes to avoid being submerged by each wave as it rolled in, and that’s when Harry suddenly let out an ear-splitting screech.

Mitch quickly swam over to him to see what was wrong. “Did you step on something?” he asked, already trying to decide if he could manage to swim back to shore while carrying Harry in some capacity.

Harry shook his head and peered down into the dark water with a frown. “Something swam past my foot,” he replied.

Mitch couldn’t help but laugh at the look on his face. “We _are_ in the ocean,” he pointed out. “It was probably a fish.”

Harry screwed his face up into an exaggerated pout as he stared back at Mitch, his expression just barely illuminated by the full moon shining above them. Then he leaped forward, wrapping himself around Mitch’s torso like a lemur as he tried to shove Mitch down beneath the water.

Mitch fought back, both because he didn’t want to drown thanks to Harry’s antics as well as the fact that he was all too aware of the fact that he was naked and so was Harry, and Harry was very nakedly crawling all over him in the water as he struggled to gain the upper hand in the fight.

Finally, Mitch managed to toss Harry off, but instead of Harry ending up face-first in the waves with a mouthful of salt water, he simply twisted around to land on his back with far more grace than he ever possessed on land before spreading his arms out and beginning to tread water, peacefully, as though that had always been his intent.

Mitch swam away from him, deeper into the water, just to be safe. Harry perked up at seeing him flee, like a cat spotting prey, and gave chase.

But Mitch wasn’t about to be caught again, so he carefully maintained his pace and stayed far out of Harry’s reach, eventually getting to a point where he wasn’t even sure how far below his feet the sand even was any more. That realization sent a fearful thrill through him, but Mitch was determined to (metaphorically) stand his ground.

Harry stopped a few feet short of him and adopted another pout as he bobbed along with the waves moving against them. “You aren’t any fun,” he called out to Mitch. “I’m gonna head back before I get hypothermia.”

Even in the water, Mitch didn’t think it was anywhere near cold enough to warrant that sort of exaggeration, but evidently, Harry wasn’t kidding about leaving. He ducked down under the surface in the next second, and by the time that Mitch realized he was serious about heading back, Harry had surfaced again a good thirty feet away, and was rapidly making progress on his feet now as he jogged out of the water.

Mitch watched from where he was still floating in deeper ocean as the pale figure of Harry’s naked body dashed up the beach to retrieve his clothes. All Harry put on were his shorts before he started to head up the road toward the villa at a brisk pace, hammering home for Mitch that Harry really didn’t have any intentions of waiting up for him.

Still, Mitch took his time swimming back to shore, reluctant to get out and let the salt dry on his skin—and even worse, dreading the feeling of walking all the way back up the road with damp clothes sticking to his skin.

Eventually, Mitch made it back to the house, surprised when he didn’t encounter Harry at all along the way even though he’d taken his own time walking back. The villa was silent and seemingly empty when Mitch opened the door, but that wasn’t any shock to him considering how early it was. The other guys—and even the girls—had a tendency to party hard when they went out drinking for the night, and Mitch didn’t really expect to see any of them returning in the next hour or two.

Harry, though, had to be around _somewhere_.

It didn’t take Mitch long to find him, but when he did, he was surprised to find that Harry had changed out of his own loose shorts and into what appeared to be one of the girls’ clothes, judging by how tight the white jean shorts were over his groin as well as the way the loose burgundy top—or maybe it was a dress?—draped awkwardly over his angular frame, gaping open at the collar so that Mitch could see one of Harry’s nipples underneath. His hair hung loose and messy where it was grown out a bit on top, the ends falling into his eyes as though he had bangs.

The effect was that Harry looked a lot younger than usual, which was only compounded by the fact that he had an actual cast iron cooking pot turned over in his lap as he sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, a ladle clutched in one hand that he kept tapping against the metal underside of the pot as he hummed loudly with his eyes closed.

Mitch thought that he was being fairly quiet even without taking into account Harry’s noisemaking, but as soon as he put one foot past the threshold, Harry’s eyes shot open and latched instantly onto Mitch with a hopeful expression.

“Come here, come here,” he said, beckoning Mitch closer with one hand while the other kept up his steady percussive rhythm against the pot. “I think I’ve finally got it.”

“Got what?” Mitch wondered as he stepped closer.

“The song,” Harry replied flatly, with an expression that clearly implied he thought that should’ve been obvious. “Listen.”

Mitch did listen, and as ridiculous as Harry looked in his borrowed clothes with a pot in his lap, he couldn’t deny that Harry was onto something. He pulled out his phone, having Harry start from the top while he recorded so they could reference it later when they were both a bit more sober, and then reached over to coax the pot and ladle out of Harry’s hands to take back to the kitchen.

Of course, when Mitch actually set foot inside the kitchen, he was met with a scene of absolute chaos. Apparently, Harry had ransacked the cupboards looking for his makeshift instruments and left an entire natural disaster’s worth of destruction in his wake.

When Mitch finally returned to Harry’s bedroom after making an attempt to tidy up, Harry had vanished, leaving Mitch at a loss. Mitch finally found Harry in _his_ room, rifling through Mitch’s suitcase for god knows what reason, and Mitch hurried over to yank him away before he could make just as big a mess in there as he had in the kitchen.

“God, you’re like a toddler,” Mitch muttered under his breath as he steered Harry back down the hall and into his own room again. “Have you been a bad boy?” he jokingly asked when Harry tried to squirm out of his hold, resembling a rambunctious child in that moment far more than the twenty-something international superstar he actually was.

Harry paused, causing Mitch to stop short just inside the doorway. His eyes widened as he stared at Mitch, unblinking. “Don’t want to be a bad boy,” he replied in a soft voice, his pitch higher now than the gruff affectation he adopted when he was working with the rest of the guys. Then Harry opened his mouth again, and his next statement hit Mitch like a cannonball straight to the gut. “Want to be your good girl.”

Mitch stared at Harry, frozen for a few milliseconds, and then slowly, he reached behind himself and tugged the door to Harry’s bedroom closed. “Yeah?” he asked, his voice rough with some as-yet unidentified emotion.

Harry nodded fervently; his hands raised up to his chest in supplication. “Yeah,” he breathed.

Mitch licked his lips and shuffled forward, pushing Harry back toward the bed. “Why don’t you show me just how good you can be?” he replied, surprising himself with how confident the words sounded once they’d left his mouth.

If Harry had any inkling of Mitch’s conflicting feelings, he didn’t show it. He surged forward, kissing Mitch hard, and Mitch, without even thinking about it—or maybe _because_ he wasn’t thinking—met him with just as much fervor, kissing back every bit as fiercely until his tongue was in Harry’s mouth and his hands were in Harry’s hair, and even Mitch himself would have had a hard time figuring out where one of them ended and the other began.

Harry was the first to pull away, and for a split second, Mitch started to panic, thinking that Harry was suddenly going to decide that they’d made a mistake. But the expression on Harry’s face was one of pure concentration as Harry spun Mitch around by his elbow before pushing him down onto the very edge of the bed, so that he was sitting with his feet hanging off as Harry finally let go of him so he could kneel down at his feet.

Mitch was overwhelmed. He couldn’t form words to make a question as Harry picked up Mitch’s left foot in his hand, pressing it against his shoulder as he placed a delicate kiss against the bony knob of Mitch’s ankle before making his way up the inside of his leg up to the hem of his shorts.

Harry rose up onto his knees, staring at Mitch without once looking away as he reached up to hook his fingers under the hem. Mitch didn’t dare avert his gaze even as Harry slowly peeled the shorts off, but he could feel his heartbeat rising, the panic setting in once again.

“I wasn’t exactly expecting to get laid while we were here,” Mitch blurted out, feeling suddenly compelled to explain himself to Harry, who had already managed to work Mitch’s shorts down past his knees, leaving him mostly exposed from the waist down. “I haven’t, um, groomed in a while,” he continued, wincing a little. Mitch had never really cared about body hair on his past girlfriends, and Harry had never come across as particularly shallow, but he was aware that a certain level of maintenance was usually expected in these scenarios. No one wanted a stray pube in their mouth.

Harry just raised his eyebrows as he stared up at Mitch with an unimpressed expression. “Do you really think a bit of extra hair’s going to put me off?” he asked, tossing the shorts off to the side before tugging pointedly at Mitch’s shirt.

“Well,” Mitch started, stumbling over his own thoughts as he struggled to pull the shirt over his head, “I know _you_ shave, so I just thought—”

He was cut off by the feeling of warmth and wetness along the shaft of his cock as Harry slowly curled his fingers around the base. Mitch stopped speaking, his mouth still hanging open as he stared down at Harry, his foot still resting on Harry’s shoulder while Harry slowly mouthed down Mitch’s cock while it rapidly hardened in his grip.

Mitch tipped his head back as Harry descended, only to snap upward again when Harry’s tongue moved down over his balls and then even further as he leaned forward, pushing Mitch’s leg toward his chest and giving Harry space to bury his face down between Mitch’s legs.

Mitch’s hands shot out to wind into Harry’s hair, instinctively searching for something to hold onto as Harry’s tongue explored places that Mitch had never even considered the possibility of before now. He couldn’t deny that it felt good, though, and seeing as he’d just been fully submerged in the ocean before this, he wasn’t exactly worried about the whole cleanliness issue like he might have been under other circumstances. Hopefully Harry liked the taste of salt.

Mitch felt his breathing grow more ragged as Harry’s licking got even sloppier, the movement of his hand over Mitch’s dick slow but unceasing as Harry’s mouth gradually drove Mitch insane. Mitch was pretty sure he was harder now than he’d ever been, the throbbing of his dick in Harry’s hand echoed by the feeling of his pulse jumping in his throat, his fingers curled tight in Harry’s hair as he tried to stave off an orgasm that seemed inevitable.

“Stop,” Mitch finally bit out. He tugged at Harry’s hair, deciding to be careful about what he said next when he caught a glimpse of the disappointed look on Harry’s face as he sat up with a frown. “How much is on the table here?” Mitch asked in a slow, deliberate manner.

Harry scrunched up his eyebrows in confusion for a brief moment before a flash of realization crossed his features. “Are you seriously trying to ask me if I’ll let you score a home run?” he retorted with a smirk.

“I’m surprised you even know what that is,” Mitch admitted without directly answering the question.

Harry rolled his eyes and let Mitch’s foot slip off his shoulder to land in his lap instead, where Mitch could feel that Harry was just as hard as he was, even in the confines of his too-small jean shorts. “I’ve been living in the States since I was a teenager,” Harry pointed out. “I might not have picked up the accent, but your shitty baseball metaphors for sex were a little harder to avoid.”

Mitch blinked at Harry a few times. “So is home plate something you’d be open to?” he asked again.

Harry sounded a bit dubious as he responded. “You sure you want to?” He seemed to already be steeling himself for a potential rejection, though Mitch couldn’t understand why.

Mitch nodded, even though his brain was still telling him it would be smarter to slow down and figure out just where the hell they stood in relation to each other now that sex was on the table. But the other part of him knew that if he told Harry no now, he’d just end up regretting the missed opportunity later.

Harry got to his feet slowly, hovering over Mitch for a few seconds before leaning down and putting a hand directly in the center of his chest and pushing him down onto his back against the bed. Mitch tilted his head up far enough to watch as Harry made a show of slowly wiggling out of his borrowed clothes, leaving him in just the loose shirt-dress-thing that draped down to his upper thighs, obscuring his dick from Mitch’s gaze, though the shape of it was still visible through the fabric as he shifted uneasily under Mitch’s unyielding stare.

“I could turn around,” Harry offered, looking down at himself a bit shyly as he tugged at the hem of the shirt. “Or I could put something else on, if it helps.”

“You don’t think I’m attracted to you like this?” Mitch wondered.

Harry paused before replying. “Are you?” he asked, voice hitching in his throat halfway through the query.

Mitch stared at Harry for a long moment, openly considering the line of his throat, the softness around his chest and belly and hips that he could make out even through the loose draping of the thin fabric around him, the rounded thighs just peeking out underneath the slanted hem. “I’d say my dick’s a pretty big fan of you right about now, yeah,” he admitted.

Harry went bright red but said nothing as he turned around to get something out of his bag. Mitch’s eyes followed him, widening as Harry bent over double in the process, exposing his naked ass without a hint of the shame he seemed to possess before Mitch’s reassurance.

Mitch sat up when Harry turned around again, but as soon as Harry walked over with a bottle of lube and a condom clutched in one hand, he marched over and pushed Mitch straight back down onto his back with a warning glance. “Let me,” Harry told him as he climbed up to straddle Mitch’s lap before reaching behind himself to slick up his hole and slide the condom onto Mitch’s cock.

Mitch let out a quiet hiss as Harry slowly sank down onto his thighs, the hot clench of Harry’s muscles around him like nothing he’d ever felt before. The pace was slow at first, and then faster once Harry got his bearings, his palms braced in the middle of Mitch’s torso just above his belly button as he rode Mitch with a determined expression.

Mitch wanted desperately to reach up and push the loose fabric away from his hips, to replace it with his hands instead, but he knew that if he let himself touch Harry now, he wouldn’t ever want to stop. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving bruises on Harry’s hips and thighs in the shape of his fingerprints, watching them fade. He stared up into Harry’s bright green eyes and told himself it was better not to leave his mark on Harry at all.

“Are you close?” Harry panted as he slammed his ass down to meet Mitch’s bucking hips. He was sweating again, a droplet falling from his nose to splash against Mitch’s tongue as he panted with an open mouth.

Mitch closed his lips around the taste, swallowing hard before nodding. He wasn’t sure he could even make words, the feeling of Harry tight around his cock funneling his all his available brainpower into processing the sensation of being inside him, rendering speech impossible.

“Okay,” Harry said, breathing hard as his eyes fluttered closed for a moment. “Okay, fuck.” He rolled his hips in a way that made Mitch dig his fingers into the bedspread, and then Harry clenched down even harder around his cock, over and over again like he was trying to milk the come directly out of him.

It worked. Mitch came harder than he ever had in his life, his eyes rolling back into his own head as he surged upward to bury himself as deeply into Harry as he could get. Even with the condom, Mitch was sure he’d ever had sex that good before, and it was almost a disappointment when he came back to himself to find Harry lying next to him instead of on top of him, one hand wrapped around his cock with two fingers curled inside his ass, a series of high-pitched whines pouring out of his throat.

Mitch watched as Harry jerked himself off with a frantic urgency, his eyes following the path of Harry’s come as it spurted out of his cock to splash onto the tattoos adorning his stomach and chest. Somewhere between Mitch’s orgasm and Harry’s, he’d managed to discard the borrowed shirt entirely, and the two lay there next to each other naked as they’d been in the ocean while trying to catch their breath.

They didn’t talk about what happened. Harry was the first to get up, and Mitch watched from the bed as he walked into the en suite bathroom. The door closed behind him just before Mitch heard the shower start up, and he figured that was that. He climbed out of Harry’s bed and collected his discarded clothes as well as the ones Harry had stolen from one of the girls (Mitch wasn’t sure which one), making sure to drop the whole load off in the laundry room before returning to his own room to shower before the rest of the guys got back.

When Mitch finally stepped out half an hour later, he was surprised to discover that at least half the group had returned earlier than expected. He was even more surprised when he wandered out of his room fully dressed once more to find Harry smack in the middle of them, joining in with their raucous laughter and acting like nothing had happened in their absence. Except for the way that he wouldn’t meet Mitch’s eyes as he walked into the room, that is.

Tyler reached for Mitch as he walked past into the kitchen, clearly trying to rope him into whatever they were talking about, but Mitch wasn’t in the mood.

“I’m pretty tired,” he said, pouring himself a glass of water without looking up to see Tyler’s reaction. “I think I’m actually just gonna head to bed.”

“Okay, man,” Tyler replied with a clear note of disappointment in his voice. “Just don’t expect the rest of us to be up bright and early tomorrow.”

Mitch rolled his eyes and quickly finished his water before setting it down next to the sink. “You haven’t been up before noon the rest of the time we’ve been here,” he pointed out. “I’m not expecting shit.” With that, he carefully weaved his way through the cluster of bodies bunched up around the kitchen entryway, pointedly avoiding even the slightest brush of his body against Harry’s as he made his way back to his room, where he promptly dropped onto his bed and shoved a pillow over his head in an attempt at drowning out the noise.

The next day, Mitch made it a mission to avoid Harry while navigating the house for necessary things like using the bathroom and the kitchen, but he was somewhat ironically disappointed to discover it wasn’t all that difficult—Harry seemed to be avoiding him right back.

The only issue was that avoiding Harry meant avoiding most of the other inhabitants of the villa as well, so Mitch soon found himself on his own, sitting in the living room with a guitar in his lap after lunch while he plucked out a quick accompaniment to the lyrics that had been brewing in the back of his mind all morning.

_“I had her once and wrote a song about her_  
I wanna scream and  
I wanna shout it out  
I hope she hears me now

_She's a good girl_  
She's such a good girl  
She's a good girl  
She feels so good.”

Mitch let his fingers fall away from the strings with a sigh. He looked up, carefully schooling his expression into something a bit less obviously melancholy when he found Alex leaning against the doorway watching him.

“What is that?” Alex asked curiously, nodding toward the guitar in Mitch’s hands.

“Uh.” Mitch struggled to think of a good response before finally settling on the truth. “New song Harry and I were working on.”

Alex gave an approving nod as he crossed his arms over his chest and took a step away from the doorway to head into the next room. “It’s catchy,” he said in parting. “You should play it for Jeff later.”

“Yeah,” Mitch replied dully. “Sure.”

Inwardly, Mitch was wishing he’d never started helping Harry write the song in the first place, because no matter what Jeff thought of it, and no matter how good it was, Mitch couldn’t pretend that it was about some faceless girl Harry had gone on a date with once upon a time before he’d ever even laid eyes on Mitch. Now, it was about Harry, and Mitch wasn’t sure how he was supposed to look Harry in the face while recording it, or playing it night after night on tour, while knowing the truth behind every lyric.

As though summoned by the passage of his name through Mitch’s thoughts, Harry followed Alex out of the kitchen and walked across the room without glancing at Mitch even once.

Mitch followed Harry with his eyes until he was gone, and then picked up the guitar pick again, returning his fingers to the familiar position of the last few chords of the song as he sang the words over and over again under his breath. If the song was going on Harry’s album, he at least needed to make sure he got it right.

_“She’s such a good girl, she feels so good!”_


End file.
